Bush says memo did not spell out attack

`No indication of a terrorist threat'

April 12, 2004|By Naftali Bendavid, Washington Bureau.

WASHINGTON — President Bush on Sunday forcefully defended his administration's response to warnings of terrorist activity before the Sept. 11 attacks, one day after a declassified memo gave critics fresh ammunition to assert that the administration responded too sluggishly to such warnings.

Bush specifically dismissed any notion that his administration should have responded more aggressively to the memo, called a President's Daily Brief, or PDB. He suggested the information in the memo--dated Aug. 6, 2001, about five weeks before terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon--was far too vague.

"The PDB was no indication of a terrorist threat," Bush said at Ft. Hood, where he was visiting troops for Easter near his Texas ranch. "There was not a time and place of an attack. It said Osama bin Laden had designs on America. Well, I knew that. What I wanted to know was, is there anything specifically going to take place in America that we needed to react to?"

Bush added, "That PDB said nothing about an attack on America. It talked about intentions, about somebody who hated America. Well, we knew that."

The memo, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." and prepared at Bush's request for his daily briefing on intelligence matters, has been the subject of controversy for weeks. It was declassified by the White House on Saturday night.

Critics say the memo leaves little doubt that just weeks before Sept. 11, the Bush team was warned that bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network were planning a major assault inside the United States, possibly involving hijackings. Given the nature of the threat, they say, the administration's response was startlingly lacking in urgency.

The memo noted that the FBI had about 70 bin Laden-related investigations under way and cited "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."

But Bush officials say the document was largely historical, citing information dating back to 1997 and describing bin Laden's goals in general terms. The issue flared up last Thursday when National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, under questioning from the special commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, maintained that the memo was "historical."

Bush noted Sunday that such agencies as the CIA and FBI were investigating and trying to disrupt any attacks. He repeated his assertion that if he'd had any "actionable intelligence" about an impending attack, he would have responded strongly.

Bush noted that while the memo suggested the possibility of a hijacking, it envisioned that bin Laden's operatives might seize a plane and hold it to demand the freeing of a prisoner held in the United States--not fly it into buildings without any demands or negotiation.

One member of the Sept. 11 commission suggested Sunday that the memo should have served as an alarm bell that bin Laden was planning to strike on U.S. soil. White House officials have said that although they received many intelligence intercepts in the summer of 2001 suggesting a major terrorist attack was being planned, those intercepts indicated the strike would be aimed at U.S. targets abroad.

"There was a lot of focus overseas, but the CIA author of this PDB, by stressing the fact that bin Laden was determined to strike in the United States, was telling the president that we ought to look here as well," Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic member of the commission, told CNN's "Late Edition."

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told NBC's "Meet the Press" that it was "probably true" that the memo should have raised a bigger alarm at the White House.

But Sept. 11 commission Chairman Thomas Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, told The New York Times that the memo should not be viewed as a "smoking gun."

The commission's activity has provoked a furor over whether the Bush administration paid sufficient attention to terrorism when it took office in January 2001, and whether it adhered too stubbornly to an outdated view that major threats to the United States would come from hostile nations such as Iraq or North Korea, not independent terrorist networks.

The debate has been followed avidly by families of those who died on Sept. 11, as well as a broader public for whom the attacks remain a shattering event. But the issue also has taken a partisan cast, and the question of the Bush administration's priorities before Sept. 11 has emerged as a campaign issue.

The debate is unlikely to flag this week, when the commission holds hearings Tuesday and Wednesday into the actions of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies before Sept. 11. Among the witnesses scheduled to appear are Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and his predecessor, Janet Reno, as well as FBI Director Robert Mueller and Clinton administration FBI chief Louis Freeh.